Strange Times, Backwards Times

This is not progress.

A lot of people are suffering emotionally in our current world situation, yet what I find being proposed as the solution to this climate of unrest is to further elevate the emotionally overtaxed to leadership positions. No society can sustain putting those who desperately require guidance into positions where they lead others into their own lowly, needy station. We need people to help guide those who are overburdened out of oppression or victimization and into empowerment.

I feel like the world we find ourselves in is one in which we take a Tony Robbins archetype and tell him to just shut up and follow the example of some couch surfing, extremely angry, morbidly obese, perpetual victim teetering on the edge of being placed for personal safety into a mental institution- and not mistakenly for his/her/zer misunderstood genius.

Something about this messaging is extremely fucked up. Does the political left not see this or have they truly convinced themselves this is progress?

I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s. It was a different time. We had different values, better values. It might have been the peak for this current civilization in many ways. Cosby was king. I don’t mean the man who drugged women to rape them. I mean his character in his TV show, Heathcliff Huxtable, a doctor with a lawyer wife, a large family and focused on empowerment and education of healthy, beautiful, strong and intelligent black people. We grew up seeing black people as not merely our equals but in many ways, as our sages. The Fresh Prince took wisdom from his loving and commanding Uncle Phil, a fair and honest judge. We looked to experience and education for guidance. Education wasn’t the regurgitation of nonsense it is today in the post grievance world. Academic lessons once held up to scrutiny and investigation. Not hiding from criticism.

At the time, we learned to protect the vulnerable and downtrodden. We learned to look after them and make sure no one was maligned. It was a beautiful time in history. I’m sad my kids won’t know it. It’s not the world we live in today.

Today, we take the underprivileged, unhealthy, drug addled, emotionally damaged and those lacking in common sense and critical thought, and we give them political and cultural positions of power. We recruit them up the corporate ladder on virtue merits, not exactly or even usually, vocationally skilled people. They move up based solely on social capital. We call this progress.

At first, we seemed to be helping the downtrodden. But like I said from the start, it shifted at some point from an elevation of the gifted and skilled, the wise, the just, the strong (emotionally and physically) and the noble to an elevation of the weak, the fat, the attention starved, the maladjusted, the infirmed, the debased and the depraved. It wasn’t just about helping them reach new heights. It was about making their lows not only acceptable but imperial. Fetishized, comical, overly cosmetically enhanced, cross-dressing pole dancers are now the so-called “brave.” Many mothers today take their children to watch these undressed icons of ignobility writhing, crawling on the floor and twerking for an “elevated” cultural education. We are feeding our children rotten fruit. This is not the equality nor the sage wisdom of the 80’s. It’s lopsided and upside down.

I was brought up not to hate. I wasn’t even allowed to use the word. It was one of four letters with similar status to “fuck” in my house. If I should point out that the ignoble are ill suited as children’s heros, I will be accused of hate. Normally, I would balk at that depiction, but lately, I think it’s true. It’s not that I hate the lowly who are being witlessly promoted. I hate the promotion. I hate the stupidity, the regress of society towards debauchery and self-loathing behaviors: drug addicted, medically dependent masses being steered to their dependency to barely cling to their fragile, vulnerable and often twisted gender identities.

How did this happen?

I blame clinical, pharmaceutical, technological and academic corruption. Huxley predicted this. He saw the coming debauchery, sexual depravity and addiction to Soma. It’s almost as if Brave New World has been a blueprint for the true New World Order. The Huxley family ran many of the academic/scientific think tanks that still run the world today. UNESCO was Julian Huxley’s brain child. At every turn, we watched the oil industry tycoons sell their byproducts as medicine. They purchased universities to influence future physicians toward their products. They used sponsorship to sway the media and the masters of social media. It’s all in James Corbett’s How and Why Big Oil Conquered the World documentary series. It feels as if all we can do as “those in the know” is to watch with all the understanding of what is happening while having little power to change it. I often feel like a time traveler from the future, having seen all the things that went terribly wrong for the world but afraid to meddle with the timeline as it could collapse matter itself.

Am I alone?

I suspect not. It seems more likely that we are among an overwhelming majority of people who feel the same way, but whom are silenced by modern technology. All venues of social engagement and paths of social reform are monopolized by these industries of malfeasance. In some ways, we’re trapped. In others, we’re watching the system’s cracks and overloads. The pressure of trying to tamp everyone down is creating a force that can’t hold much longer. As it starts to tear apart, dissent is seeping through every crack with the force of a hurricane against a fractured and leaky dam.

It’s only been 40 years from the 80’s, but even things that started well before them are being looked at from such a vantage as to never allow such egregious breaches of trust happen again.

Will the pendulum swing wildly from one misplaced power to another? Should we go from the absolutely putrid to the sanctimoniously pious running the world? Or are we ready for a true leveling of power, one which promotes fierce individualism? I don’t know if the cognitively dissident are truly ready much less desirous of self-rule. We can only hope that ready or not, its time has come. Along with it, a new culture of health, pragmatism, objectivity, investigation, responsibility and reason may sweep across humanity like a cool, autumn breeze after a particularly brutal summer.

It has been a very long, hot summer both physically and figuratively. I’m ready for this calming, cooling relief. How about you?